Best-selling author and syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, whose biting wit and down-home humor often speared the policies of fellow-Texan President George W Bush, died on Wednesday after a battle with breast cancer. She was 62.
CHICAGO: Best-selling author and syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, whose biting wit and down-home humor often speared the policies of fellow-Texan President George W Bush, died on Wednesday after a battle with breast cancer. She was 62.
Ivins was so passionate about her work that she dictated her last two columns after she became too weak to write, her editor wrote in a memorial.
Like so many before, those columns attacked Bush's policies and urged readers to stand up against the war in Iraq.
"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell," she urged in a column dated January 11.
But even as she was dying, Ivins never lost her sense of humor.
"The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck," she said in her second last column.
Ivins began focusing her wit and investigative skills on Bush after he unseated her friend, former Texas Governor Ann Richards, in the first election he had ever won.
She wrote several books about Bush, including the bestseller Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W Bush's America.
In 2003, David Broder of The Washington Post remarked: "If there is a shrewder, funnier observer of the American scene writing today than Molly Ivins, I do not know her."
Ivins was a frequent speaker at political rallies and a strong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which she credits with defending the US Constitution's Bill of Rights.
Ivins never married and divided charitable bequests in her will between the ACLU and her cherished Texas Observer magazine, which she edited from 1970 to 1976 before leaving for The New York Times, Creators Syndicate said.
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